Right Hand Drawn by Miki Huynh

The recontracting period came round. The time when JET Programme participants pass in their sheets stating whether or not they plan to stay for another year. I think all eigo no kyoshi can agree that it’s a very difficult point in time to make that sort of decision. You’re at the six month marker where things feel more familiar, you know what you like about life and the job and what bothers you. However, everything still rests on the verge of change, and six months won’t predict what a further eighteen months will bring.

So I tossed and turned through the night every night for a week, handed in my “Yes” on Wednesday, and tossed and turned some more up until today.

Part of the reason was knowing that I’m not a kid anymore. If you’re college bred, you can be fed the idea that life needs to fit into some sort of grid or time line that has you earning X amount of money, settled down with person Y, and owning Z properties by age 30. Even among some of the twenty-somethings out here, I can sense the urgency to nail those life track deadlines before it’s too late. Otherwise you waste your youth and your time.

I remember too how a few people weren’t shy to condescend my choice to do JET before I left for Japan in July. I’m not dumb enough to miss the gap between earned income and degree expectations; I know what they imply.

The more you follow through with the realities of a day to day, though, you start to recognize that impatience and self-effacement are kind of a waste of youth. Or rushes you too much into decisions you’re not entirely ready for. Time after college taught me far more than higher education did about what it means to live… how to emotionally process uncertainty, how making choices can both increase opportunities and worsen lingering anxieties, how to monetarily keep yourself together without falling back on the folks. The path from LA to Chicago to Hamada has obviously been a shifting one, maybe more lateral in progress than I’d like, but never entirely unstable, and one where I can say I took full responsibility all the way through. So I do actually pat myself on the back for going abroad now without any of the fresh-out-of-college-what-do-I-do? butterflies and with just the awareness that I get a shit ton of travel time and Asia all around me.

But I also don’t feel flighty enough to forget that many relationship shifts happen between friends and family because of distance. What I neglect for another year may not be there when I come back. Although with the friends I still talk to, it doesn’t seem I should have too much to worry about. To be honest, the more I think about it, I’m kind of a lucky butt. Even my mother seems to be doing alright these days, and I can honestly believe her when she says so.

Eh, anyway, so I’m teaching for another year. Just because there’s time enough to create the proper segue back to the states and to the people I care about. The world’s still opening up more options.

And I’ll be back to posting more pictures and things soon, too. So there should something more interesting for you to look at next week..

…promise.